Kevin Young

Kevin Young (born November 8, 1970, Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.) is a poet, essayist, and editor whose work explores African American history and culture, in particular music, food, art, creativity, and traditions of death and mourning. He was appointed director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020, and he has served as the poetry editor for The New Yorker since 2017.

Childhood and education

Young is the only child of Paul E. Young, an ophthalmologist, and Azzie Young, a chemist. His parents grew up in Louisiana, and their Southern heritage heavily influenced Young’s work as an adult. Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, but the family moved frequently for his parents’ work—to Chicago, Boston, and Syracuse, New York—before settling in Topeka, Kansas, when Young was about 10. When he was 13 he enrolled in a summer creative writing workshop taught by fiction writer Thomas Fox Averill, who immediately recognized Young’s precocious talent as a poet and mentored him. Young developed a love for the poetry of E.E. Cummings and Rita Dove; he was also influenced by Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, John Berryman, and Federico García Lorca.

After graduating from high school, Young attended Harvard University, where he studied under acclaimed poets Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido. During his freshman year he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. He also joined a local group of Black writers called the Dark Room Collective, which included future U.S. poet laureates Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Colson Whitehead. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1992, Young was awarded a two-year fellowship to study at Stanford University and then received a master’s degree in fine arts from Brown University in 1996.

Poetry collections

Young’s first poetry collection, Most Way Home (1995), introduced themes that have reappeared throughout his work: African American history, oral traditions, death and grief, family and heritage, and the cultural differences between the American South and North. His next collection, To Repel Ghosts (the double album) (2001), introduced another dominant theme in his poetry: music. The collection memorialized the life and work of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and drew connections between poetry, painting, jazz, and hip-hop. (Young revisited the collection in 2005 in a “revamped” edition titled To Repel Ghosts: The Remix.) With the publication of his next two books—Jelly Roll: a blues (2003) and Black Maria (2005)—Young completed a trilogy of collections that link poetry with other art forms: blues music and film noir, respectively. Jelly Roll was a finalist for a National Book Award, and Black Maria was staged as a play by the Providence Black Repertory Company in 2007.

By the time Young published his next collection, For the Confederate Dead (2007), he had established himself as a prolific and masterful voice in American poetry. In its evaluation of the troubled legacy of the South, For the Confederate Dead freely mingles the past and present by using such forms as ballad and elegy. Young described it as a “quilt of history” in an interview that year with National Public Radio (NPR). The book’s title (and its poem of the same name) evoked Robert Lowell, Jr.’s “For the Union Dead” (1964), a celebrated poem that alludes to the American Civil War and the 20th-century struggle to integrate schools.

Dear Darkness (2008) memorializes Young’s father, who died in 2004 in a hunting accident. The collection pays tribute to family and grief in poems such as “Cousins,” “Aunties,” “Pallbearing,” and “Ode to My Father’s Feet.” Other poems explore the bonds of family through short yet deeply perceptive odes to Southern foodways such as gumbo, catfish, and barbecue and to specific places of Young’s personal history. Using African American idioms, colloquialisms, and unconventional punctuation, the poems reveal a complexity of feelings. One of the best-known poems in the collection is the wry “Ode to the Midwest.” Its humorous first lines (“I want to be doused / in cheese / & fried”) kick off a litany of nostalgic desires to convey a landscape that engenders equal parts affection, stoicism, and loneliness:

I want to be

the only black person I know.

I want to throw
out my back & not
complain about it.…

I want love, n stuff—

In 2011 Young published Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, a “part libretto” and “part captivity epistle” that aimed to give voice to the Africans who rebelled on the slave ship Amistad in 1839. Winner of the American Book Award in 2012, Ardency combined choral and epistolary forms with epic language, offering poems that authentically evoked the spirit of rebellion and the struggle for freedom. In Book of Hours (2014), he returned to his father’s death, this time exploring grief alongside the joy brought by the birth of Young’s son. In “Charity,” Young writes about the poignant ritual of sorting through a deceased parent’s clothes—“the unworn, / unwashed wreckage / of your closet”—to give to charity. Struggling to part with many items—“How can I / give away the last / of your scent?”—the discovery of unredeemed dry cleaning tickets reminds him of the unfinished work of his father’s life:

And still,
father, you have errands,

errant dry cleaning to pick up—
yellow tags whose ghostly
carbon tells a story

Book of Hours was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the NEA Big Read program and was awarded the Donald Justice Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 2016 Young published Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, followed by Brown in 2018, a meditation on all things “brown,” including American abolitionist John Brown, the landmark 1954 ruling against segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education , and heroes of Black culture such as the Harlem Globetrotters. In a review, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote of Young, “Keeping up with him is like trying to keep up with Bob Dylan or Prince in their primes. Even the bootlegs have bootlegs.”

In 2021 Young released Stones, which features poems that pay homage to loss and family, in particular to his family’s Southern heritage and traditions. The book was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Young’s poetic style has been described and analyzed by many critics and fans of his work, but perhaps none so perfectly as former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. During Young’s interview with NPR interview in 2007, Young was joined by Collins, who offered insight into Young’s distinctive style. Collins said:

He lets a lot of the talk and noise of the world into his poems instead of filtering them out and committing a kind of delicate act of literature. So you can hear the rhythms of speech and traffic and musical instruments and all sorts of things in his poetry.

Editing, nonfiction, and curating achievements

As an editor, Young has been as prolific as he has been as a poet. Beginning with Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers in 2000, he has edited numerous anthologies on various themes and subjects. Blues Poems (2003) and Jazz Poems (2006) are volumes of classic and contemporary poetry on the two musical forms. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (2010) contains 150 poems, with selections by poets such as Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Alexander. The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (2012) offers poems on all things food-related. Young also edited Selected Poems: John Berryman (2004), The Best American Poetry 2011, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (2012), the highly acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020), and Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition (2021), which features works from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade to the Reconstruction era. In 2017 Young joined the staff of The New Yorker as the magazine’s poetry editor.

In 2012 Young published his first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, an encyclopedic work of cultural criticism that made the case for the centrality of African Americans in American culture. The book won the PEN Open Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (2017) was praised by critics as a timely and engaging history of fakery in American culture. In the book, Young traces the role of race and gender in American hoaxes. In a profile of Young in Esquire, Robert P. Baird wrote of the book, “Young’s deeper argument is that we can’t escape race when we’re talking about hoaxes, because race itself—for all its implacable real-life effects—remains the most consequential hoax in American history.” Bunk won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2022 Young released his first children’s book, Emile and the Field, which features illustrations by Chioma Ebinama.

Young has also taught at Emory University, where he was curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library from 2005 to 2016. He then served as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In 2020 he was named the Andrew W. Mellon director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, succeeding the museum’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch III. Young’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.